Mass Effect 3 Endings: Brief Analysis and Discussion
Big spoiler alert
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Gamers who have just finished playing ME3 are quite easy to recognize. A slightly elongated face, distraction in actions, and a mournful question frozen in their eyes: "What just happened?"
Overall, the "quality" of the mistakes at the finish line of the game does not significantly differ from those throughout the rest of the game, or the series in general. But, alas, quantitatively, there are a good half of them here.
The most radically inclined players bury the entire last mission. This is probably an exaggeration — London isn’t that bad. The breaks in patterns begin after Shephard is directly defeated by the Reaper beam, that is, about twenty minutes before the victorious end. When the beam covers Shepard and there is no loading, perhaps the only reasonable explanation that can come to a normal person's mind is, "Hey, the developers didn't slack off and made a bad ending!" But no, Shepard somehow survives this and even maintains quite decent motor activity.
"Okay, fine, such things have happened in ME before," thinks our spherical "normal player" in a vacuum and moves on. Overall, there are no complaints about the dialogue with the Ghost. It’s just that to finish it in "Saren-style," you need an absolutely mind-boggling number of hero/rebel points. Theoretically, without DLCs for ME2 and ME3, to get enough, you have to transfer your character and strictly, very strictly follow one of the branches. However, even if you don't manage to talk down your sworn enemy, it won’t affect anything — you can simply shoot him with a similar result.
And then everything starts...
And here Shepard is already talking to... uh... a boy. There's no possibility at all to know who the hell this is, why he appears in such a form, and what happened to him in the end, if "The Citadel is part of me."
And here we are given the choice of one of three identical endings. Visually, whatever we choose, the videos will differ only and exclusively in the color of the beam that destroys everything that can be destroyed.
Saving the rachni, quarians, geth, curing the genophage, collectors' base, suicide mission, the Council... all this subtly merges at the very end. All these decisions ultimately affect nothing. At all. The shades of the ending (the fate of Earth, Normandy, and Shepard, respectively) are determined by an abstract "fleet strength."
The Catalyst.
And do you know what decision lowers the bar for an "ideal ending" from five thousand to four? You’ll never guess. The fact that Anderson will die from a bullet or two minutes from bleeding. Fleets? Nope, never heard of them...
Final chord: earning even these four thousand in single-player is practically impossible. Even methodically gathering all the artifacts. Even with all the "correct" (i.e., directed at increasing fleet strength against all moralities) decisions. Even with all the DLC and character transfer, the chances of racking up this amount are quite illusory... and all because you didn't play multiplayer.
Don't even hope that this fleet will be enough until you boost your alter ego in online battles.
This is a radical way to battle piracy, of course — making the "fleet readiness" percentage in single-player dependent on the player's successes in multiplayer. Only no one mentions this anywhere, and visually the battle readiness bar fills up to 100% long before the actually needed "100%."
In brief about all endings
The gloomy logic of the synthetics, under which Shepard is entrusted to solve the fate of the Universe essentially randomly, defies understanding. However, what is, is.
"Red" (renegade) ending
— They killed the geth!
— Bastards!
Everyone is dead. An EM of cosmic scale wipes out all synthetics, ships, stations, and devices on all planets in all systems, connected in any way with synthetic life. The Citadel and relays, of course, get covered. Obviously, there is a genocide of the geth, quarians (suits), and krogan (Tuchanka won't last long without filters, as will a huge pile of colonies). A rollback to the Stone Age for the few survivors. UPD: Correction, normal technologies are still preserved, as can be seen by Tali's suit on Normandy. Essentially, the ending could be called "do the Reapers' work yourself, only in reverse." Incidentally, it’s the only one in which Shepard can survive, but it won’t help much: in absolute isolation on a shattered Citadel, he still won’t last long. In a sense, not getting enough fleet points (the connection of concepts is lost again) is even more humane than a torturous death a la the last Protheans.
"Blue" (heroic) ending
You knew it, you knew it, you bastard!
Suddenly it turns out that all this damn time the Ghost was absolutely and completely right. The boy plainly states that Shepard will be able to control the Reapers. With fatal consequences for himself, but still. The relays are still destroyed, but theoretically, this is indeed the "ideal" ending for the galactic community. With the only correction that the economy has been shattered to pieces, and we all suddenly need massive volumes of fuel for communication between star clusters. The Citadel remains hanging over Earth.
"Green" ending (synthesis)
The local representative of the divine phenomenon describes the essence of the process quite vaguely. Crush a human to merge all DNA into one? All science fiction nervously smokes on the sidelines; this is an overkill even for it. If you don’t count the fact that all races have bizarrely glued and mixed, the essence is little different from the previous ending. Oh yes, the relays and the Citadel are covered again.
Normandy
Joker and company during the ending suddenly find themselves in a warp jump between relays. What the hell they are doing there is a mystery. An even bigger mystery is how and where they manage to land even in the "red" ending. Finally, how do their companions survive a Reaper shot without a single scratch and, moreover, end up on the Normandy after that? Notably, Garrus stands out for some exceptional survivability (he often appears first when they exit the ship), but all other presumably dead characters can unexpectedly come back to life at that moment as well.
Looks like he made it after all.
In the "green" ending, one can rejoice for EDI and Joker if the player hasn’t fallen into complete shock from what’s happening — as now, thanks to "synthesis", they can be "together" in every sense of the word.
Post-credits
The dialogue at the end is ultimately devastating. The player receives absolutely no information regarding the fate of the galaxy or the fate of its individual representatives. Shepard has become for someone "a beautiful legend", but how, what, where?..
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*In the end, far too many questions remain. And there is no ME4 to answer them. Among the other key issues: close to zero impact of all decisions made in the trilogy, visual uniformity of all endings, voluntary-compulsory multiplayer.